Diamond Lake to Corvallis

While at Crater Lake National Park, we met a nice Ranger on his day off who gave us a lot of information on all the regions around the park.  He suggested we head to Diamond Lake for fishing – already suspecting we wouldn’t catch anything at Crater Lake before we even tried.  We took his advice and found it to be a beautiful lake with a great campground (and you can’t beat $12/night), but still didn’t catch any fish (are you seeing a theme here?).  We really needed a boat to give it a good effort – I waded out a hundred yards from shore, but I still couldn’t get my bait in deep enough water.  That’s my theory anyway. 

Following Diamond Lake, we headed for Corvallis.  On the way, we met Paula’s parents for dinner in Roseburg (they happened to be driving up to WA to visit her brother).  Oregon has many, many wonderful campgrounds that are state owned, but they tend not to be along the 5 freeway.  So we stay at a cheapee motel in Corvallis. 

Corvallis is home to Oregon State University and supposed to be the quintessential college town, but it was hard to get a good feel for it in a few hours.  However, there was nothing pulling at us to stay longer.  We don’t have a schedule, but we do need something to grab our attention to make it worthwhile to stay in one place.  So after driving around town a little bit, walking around OSU for an hour or two, and eating lunch at American Dream Pizza (something about being on a campus made us want pizza), we headed up to Portland.

With the exception of the 5 freeway, it seemed all of the roads in Oregon seemed to follow rivers or waterways. This is one of the many scenic streams we saw while driving.

Our $12/night campsite at Diamond Lake. This is one place we really wished we had a screened-in enclosure for the picnic table... the bugs were relentless during our Scrabble game.

Mining operation: the boys dug for hours, pretending they were miners, complete with head lamps and laterns. Unfortunately, they didn't find anything of value - they only succeeded in becoming filthy.

Lumberjacks in training: the boys found a floating log that they rolled around Diamond Lake.